A wireless communication network may deploy a two-way relay to enable two nodes, which may not be able to communicate with each other otherwise, to exchange data. Physical layer network coding (PNC) can be used to improve the efficiency and/or capacity of a relaying scheme.
An example approach for relaying, often referred to as “amplify-and-forward,” may be able to not decode the signals from the two nodes. The relay may simply broadcast the summation of the signals received from the two nodes together with the noise seen by the relay, subject to some power constraint. Each of the two nodes can decode the data intended for it by performing echo cancellation and channel decoding. However, performance may be limited in this approach because the power used for transmitting the summation of the signals from the two nodes may be twice as high as conventional transmission. In addition, the noise at the relay may be amplified and forwarded to the receiving nodes.